Feedback (tooltip/hint) to drag shapes from the left into the canvas

[electronicwhisper]

When you click a primitive shape (Circle, Rectangle, Text) in the create panel that you can't edit, there should be a tooltip or feedback of some kind that you should drag the shape in to the canvas. Beginners often get caught by this.

Here is the file where the create panel view is defined,
https://github.com/cdglabs/apparatus/blob/master/src/View/CreatePanel.coffee

There are currently no tooltips in the system. Maybe there should be a system-wide way to make tooltips/hints. Do you see any other places in the interface that could use tooltips/hints?

[joshuahhh]

Often, my first step after dragging a shape into the canvas is to reset its X and Y coordinates to zero. That's probably half "bad programmer habits", and half because I intend to take the shape and carefully position it as part of some larger group. (Incidentally, carefully positioning a shape and /then/ adding it to a translated group is a recipe for double-translating the shape and sending it off the screen, which can be kind of confusing.)

Anyway:

Proposal A: clicking a shape adds it to the drawing with all parameters set to default.
Proposal B: dragging a shape into the outline view adds it to that position in the outline with all parameters set to default.

One or both of these would fit my workflow well.

[electronicwhisper]

Clicking a shape selects it for editing (by popular demand, everyone wanted
this).

But option B makes sense to me.

On Tuesday, September 29, 2015, Joshua Horowitz [email protected]
wrote:

Often, my first step after dragging a shape into the canvas is to reset
its X and Y coordinates to zero. That's probably half "bad programmer
habits", and half because I intend to take the shape and carefully position
it as part of some larger group. (Incidentally, carefully positioning a
shape and /then/ adding it to a translated group is a recipe for
double-translating the shape and sending it off the screen, which can be
kind of confusing.)

Anyway:

Proposal A: clicking a shape adds it to the drawing with all parameters
set to default.
Proposal B: dragging a shape into the outline view adds it to that
position in the outline with all parameters set to default.

One or both of these would fit my workflow well.

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